Gemma R Cameron; Contract Software Engineer and Event Organiser

w/c 29th September

Monday

James had added some new environment variables to our development environment. I got the latest git repo out, ran the update and my Ubuntu VM died a death. I spent the day trying to get a new one up and running. The setup script and base VM had been created last summer, so were particularly out of date. This was a good opportunity to get the script updated. Our next move is to create a vagrant image. ( : At the end of the day we received some emails to indicate a customer was in the process of creating a SnapConnection. Made Mojo sauce to go with some fried fish for us tea!

Tuesday

Investigative breakdown and retro on the customer’s SnapConnect from the previous day. Decided first improvement should be to visualise the progress of all SnapConnections for us internally to learn more about the product and our customers. Evening with@squarejazz @Bakerie for @hackmanchester planning. Bought lots!

Wednesday

Had mojo sauce for lunch with a jacket potato. Addicted. Today was depicting the snapconnect journey in a more clear way for us internally. This helps us understand the domain better and is already resulting in lots of changes to the domain. CSS is not a strong point for me. So it’s taken all day to make what looks like a port in each datacentre with a cable connecting the two. If you squint it *kinda* looks like it’s meant to. Wish we had a designer. Evening: CADO! 😀 😀 😀

Thursday

Before 10am had 3 amazing things:

Met my friend at the airport with a poster! 😀 She works for a big company and mentioned she might be calling on me for some help working on building relationships between IT and the rest of the business…. Ideas ALL the way to work

Revelation that we need to re-structure some of our entities and James’ realisation yesterday that we can add history of all the events (state changes) to each entity with a timestamp for freeeeee! As well as our event log

New starter on the team is buzzing full of ideas on how to improve process here with questions about automating handover using the open source data from SDUK. Can’t wait for his input on our products.

Had a livechat with a customer after forming a SnapConnection. Got loads of awesome feedback and a better understanding of how we can present the product. Released a new feature to allow him to get a quote for connecting in the same datacentre.

Other work was making the snap connect details page more intuitive to look at. Battling with CSS.

Evening: Manchester Science Festival Launch.

Friday

#msf14 hangover. Luckily I’ve done all the thinking I need to this week. It’s mostly just making things look, feel and flow better.

Lessons for the week:

Fucking logic in frontend… As we’ve found a clear way ahead to put all this in the domain (and I’m sure I’ll be scoffing this naive ideal in a few months time) it just highlights what a mess everything is! We don’t need validation and specifications in the front end. This is the responsibility of the entity on who should see what. Not the frontend.